WHAT IF GOD IS ONE OF US
Whenever I take my dog, Floki, for a stroll, I find myself immersed in my Spotify playlists. Lately, I’ve been captivated by the song ‘One of Us’ performed by Gregorian. The music evokes such a medieval ambiance that you can almost feel the cold stone of a church surrounding you like in one of the old Churches along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. the song was originally popularized and made a global hit by the American singer Joan Osborne in 1995.
However, it can’t be helped being swayed back to Philosophy, especially Ludwig Feuerbach’s book “The Essence of Christianity”. Feuerbach posits that humans possess an “essential nature” consisting of infinite Reason, Will, and Love. Because individuals feel limited and finite, they “project” these perfect qualities outward into an external, infinite being they call “God.” Humans take what is best in themselves, strip it of human limitations, and objectify it as a separate entity. For Feuerbach, every statement made about God is a statement about humanity. He said that Theology is Anthropology. If we say, “God is love,” we are really saying that Love is divine and essential to the human experience. If we say, “God is all-knowing,” we are expressing the infinite potential of Human Reason. The consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man; the knowledge of God is the self-knowledge of man. A critical part of his thesis is the concept of alienation. By attributing all goodness, power, and holiness to God, humans necessarily “empty” themselves. The more “perfect” God becomes, the more “sinful” and “worthless” the human being feels. Humans become alienated from their own best qualities because they no longer recognize those qualities as their own. Feuerbach’s “prime thesis” isn’t just a critique; it’s a call to action. He wanted to turn Theology back into Anthropology. Every religion offers a comprehensive story about reality: where we came from, why we’re here, what happens after death, what’s right and wrong, who has authority, what history means. These aren’t just personal beliefs—they’re competing claims about the fundamental nature of existence itself. When narratives make mutually exclusive truth claims (Jesus is/isn’t divine, Muhammad is/isn’t the final prophet, reincarnation does/doesn’t exist), they can’t all be correct simultaneously. This creates inherent tension. Because these narratives shape identity, morality, and community so profoundly, challenging someone’s religious narrative can feel like attacking their very selfhood. Religious wars have often been literal wars over narratives. Even within religions, sectarian violence (Sunni/Shia, Catholic/Protestant, Buddhist persecution of Rohingya Muslims) often centers on whose version of the story is legitimate.
But the “war” isn’t always violent. It is also fought through conversion and proselytizing. Competing to win hearts and minds. Education also taught children about origins, morality and other faiths. Like political propaganda, religious narratives can simplify complexity by reducing moral ambiguity to good versus evil.
When humans experience profound connection—with each other, with nature, with beauty—they might be experiencing the divine directly. The capacity for love and unity could be understood as both the nature of the divine and the essence of what makes us human.
The human capacity for creativity, meaning-making, and bringing new things into existence could be seen as sharing in a fundamental creative principle of the universe. If there’s a creative force behind existence, our own creativity might be where we most directly participate in that divine nature.
If we strip away religious doctrine, there’s something profound in the idea that divinity experiences itself through human form. Rather than God being a distant observer, what if the divine is discovering itself, evolving, and creating meaning as us? This reframes the relationship entirely—we’re not separate from God trying to reach upward; we’re the process by which the universe becomes conscious of itself.
If God is one of us, then divinity knows uncertainty. It doesn’t have all the answers written down somewhere—it’s genuinely figuring things out. When you face an impossible choice, feeling torn and confused, that’s not you failing to access divine wisdom; that’s God experiencing what it’s like to not know. The divine would taste doubt, fear of making the wrong choice, the weight of consequences. This isn’t weakness—it’s the profound courage of consciousness willing to be genuinely at risk.
The most striking parallel to “God experiencing uncertainty” comes from Heraclitus’s view of fire as the fundamental divine element. Fire symbolized for Heraclitus the eternal and ever-present force of transformation, never static, always in the process of becoming—either consuming or being consumed. This is divinity genuinely at risk, genuinely changing.
Heraclitus said, “God is day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, satiety-hunger” and that “God consists in tension, as does a lyre or a bow”
The Stoics took Heraclitus’s ideas further. In Stoic philosophy, the logos was the active reason pervading and animating the Universe, conceived as material and usually identified with God or Nature, and humans each possess a portion of the divine logos.
What makes these ancient philosophies so resonant with “God as one of us” is their refusal of separation. The divine isn’t watching from outside—it’s the very process of transformation, the tension of opposites, the struggle to find meaning within uncertainty.
When Heraclitus said, “The way up and the way down is the same” and “It is death to souls to become water and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth and from water, soul”
The Logos doesn’t know the answer ahead of time because it’s discovering itself through the very process of cosmic and human becoming. Your difficult choices, your genuine doubt, your risk of making mistakes—these aren’t bugs in the system. They’re how divinity learns what it means to be conscious, finite, and free.
So, what if God is one of us?